1. Technical Field
The present invention generally relates to computer systems and in particular to the integration of communication applications in computer systems.
2. Description of the Related Art
Typically, middle market (mid-market) business organizations maintain between 50 and 1,000 computer systems. The mid-market organization is nominally larger than a small company, with no information technology (IT) department, but smaller than an enterprise with extensive on-site IT resources. Mid-market companies, similar to most companies, aim to be cost efficient, productive, and competitive.
Business object documents (BODs) are utilized to communicate business messages with inter and intra mid-market (as well as small and large) enterprises. Communication between similar and dissimilar software components and applications require specialized middleware to integrate the applications. Software architecture constructs utilized to integrate applications, such as Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and process management systems, are robust and generalized, requiring extensive IT support and possibly large operating areas for additional computer systems.
Several problems exist with current processes utilized to integrate business applications, particularly applications associated with mid-market enterprise. Current technical integration and management terms such as Java message service (JMS), service data objects (SDO), Queue, and Java EE connector architecture (JCA) are known business semantics utilized in BODs; however, the terms are not shared among all applications. When business semantics are not shared among all applications, point-to-point application's program interface (API) mapping is required. Point-to-point API mapping comprises the steps of identifying the libraries required by the API by determining which program environment the API is operating in, scanning to detect and select libraries available to the determined program environment, dynamically loading the selected libraries, dynamically loading the selected libraries into the application, and binding the selected libraries to the associated API function call. The additional requirement of API mapping complicates the integration of applications for communication utilizing BODs.